All too often journalists support the view that ISIS killers come from a dark, incomprehensible savagery and that they are utterly unlike the ordinary decent terrorists we used to know in the 20th century. After the 2017 murder of the children at the Manchester concert there was a harking back to the IRA bomb in 1996 which had fewer casualties but did more infrastructural damage.

Possibly the most egregious expression of this vile nonsense came from Stuart Maconie, writing in New Statesman.* He sees “no credible comparison” between the jihadi attack of 2017 and the IRA attack of 21 years earlier. Whereas the intentional selection of civilians as targets is an unambiguous war crime/crime against humanity, he clearly does not agree or he regards such crimes as sometimes understandable.

Certainly the likes of the IRA killed differently to ISIS but the argument that one is better or more acceptable than the other rests on two propositions that are utterly unacceptable. One refers to the respective methods of killing; the other to justification.

Firstly, it is argued by Maconie in common with many others that giving warning of a bombing and expressing regret afterwards is a preferable course of action. The proposition is that, having planted a bomb in a public place, giving the potential victims a sporting chance of escape and then expressing regret over the casualties, somehow makes those responsible a better class of perpetrator.

Secondly, there is the proposition that the opprobrium attaching to the selection of a civilian target should be proportional to how reasonable a cause the attackers espouse. Now, this is a thoroughly disreputable and selective form of outrage; it seeks the acceptance of war crimes in pursuit of a favoured end. Maconie is quite explicit. He argues that, while the IRA did not have the support of Manchester’s large Catholic and Irish population, their attack was not so bad because that population would have been familiar with the claims of Irish nationalism. He puts it thus:

These families and pubs and streets may not have sympathised with the IRA but their aims and their struggle would have been a familiar thread of family life and local culture. Those aims did not seem unreasonable to many: a united homeland, free of an occupying military colonial presence.

The ISIS attack on civilians, he reckons, was worse not because of the numbers or ages of the victims but because no “sane” person understands them:

By contrast, it is hard for anyone sane to comprehend what Isis or its deranged “lone wolf” sympathisers can possibly want beyond their own martyrdom and an end to what we think of as civilisation. It is a new dark age.

Certainly the ISIS mindset is dark, foreign and medieval. They don’t ever express regret and their bizarre methods of torture and killing in the Middle East alienate and frighten Western citizens. However, when it comes to bombings and shootings directed at civilians, they are precisely the same as the IRA.

All combatants select targets. They choose military, infrastructural or civilian targets. Civilians often die when a military or infrastructural target is attacked. They become in that awful phrase collateral damage. However, when civilians are targeted, an unmbiguous war crime is committed. When a public place is targeted, a perverse argument can be offered, pretending that it was a commercial target, that civilian casualties represent collateral damage and are regretted – and in any event a warning was given so that they had a sporting chance of escape. That’s complete bollocks. A developed country is rich in commercial, infrastructural targets often miles from human habitation. Targeting a public place is a carefully considered decision and it is a war crime.

Jeremy Corbyn is making a silly, unforced error in the way he looks to the wider context of the attack in Manchester, and it is the same error that saw him used by the IRA and SF.* There are two motivations for looking at context and JC simply must make it clear that his is one and that the other is reprehensible.

What happens before an outrage like that perpetrated in Manchester is that someone selects the target and then their associates participate to a greater or lesser extent. That is to say, there is deliberation leading to intention to cause civilian casualties. A military or industrial target could be selected but isn’t; the decision is to kill civilians. In short, there is a wilful choice to commit a crime against humanity. Because this is a matter of immediate target selection it cannot be justified, lessened or even explained by reference to context, circumstances or a wider struggle.

Now, there are thinking people who want to explore the wider context in which the act is situated and they most certainly should not be criticised – never mind condemned – for doing so. However, if they want to avoid the crude ridicule of feral bigots, they must be aware of the trap set for them.

You see, decent, thinking people are not the only ones looking at context. There are others looking and not in a thoughtful way but in a calculating way. The intention of these others is not to understand. Rather, they want to use context to deflect attention and responsibility away from the deliberate commission of mass murders. They want to so muddy the water that there is no difference between an attack on armed soldiers and bombing a concert hall, pub, restaurant or public place. Their objective is selective approval of some crimes against humanity. They know full well that they cannot hope for the support of anyone who holds that there is a categorical difference between a soldier/combatant and a war criminal.

A war crime cannot be explained away by reference to the cause of the war. Jeremy Corbyn can of course make this clear but his condemnation of an act or acts goes nowhere near making it clear. Neither is it enough for him to argue that for the sake of peace one must talk to one’s enemies because this implies negotiating with an honourable foe rather than the sort of person who would bomb a pub or would support such foulness. Of course one must talk and try to achieve an end to killing but Jeremy Corbyn like any decent person also has to reject explicitly the perverse doctrine that in conflict anything goes and that all civilian casualties are equally regrettable. There is an enormous difference between condemnation or saying that civilian casualties are regrettable and saying clearly that the targeting of civilians is always a war crime/crime against humanity.

In brief, it’s like this for Jeremy and indeed for everyone else: whether you are talking to them, trying to understand them or discussing their place in history, you must stand resolutely opposed; you must always be unambiguously on the side of rudimentary civilisation against ALL those who would ever consider that targeting civilians is other than the most shameful barbarism.

What happens before an outrage like those perpetrated in Paris is that someone selects the target and associates participate to a greater or lesser extent. That is to say, there is deliberation leading to intention or indifference to civilian casualties. A military or industrial target could have been selected but wasn’t; the decision is to kill civilians. In short, there is a wilful choice to commit a crime against humanity.

Because a crime against humanity is essentially target selection it cannot be justified, lessened or even explained by reference to context or circumstances. There are, however, thinking people who want to explore the context of particular acts or campaigns but there are also those who want to use context to deflect attention and responsibility away from the deliberate commission of mass murder. When people go down the latter route or allow themselves to be drawn down this route, the objective is selective approval of some crimes against humanity.

When a member of an organisation that already supports crimes of this nature, discusses context, they cannot be taken seriously. They are merely seeking consistency in trying to find circumstances in which a crime against humanity is defensible.

Listen at about 10.5 mins into the link below as Mary Lou McDonald of Sinn Féin places the Paris attacks in context: alienation, poverty, invasions in the Middle East. These are outrages in themselves; they are the causes of conflict but they are not the causes of the mass murder of civilians. However, if the pretext for mass murder in these islands was “the British presence”, it would be inconsistent not to find a pretext for similar in Paris.